Table For Four
While focusing on modern social relationships, the project deals with intimacy and transparency within private space. The focus is to create a student accommodation and introduce 20,000 students to stay in. While the design understands the 'isolation' which has emerged from domestic interior and the sense of superiority given to privacy, it creates a space comfortable enough for the inhabitant to feel private yet it creates moments of relationship between the inhabitants while still within the boundary of their private space. At its core, it is a project about introducing a new way of cohabiting a space and creating relationships within the boundary of that space that could not exist otherwise.
ALIENATED FROM WITHIN
INTIMACY AND TRANSPARENCY IN PERSONAL SPACE
The interior impacted architecture as we know it today in many significant ways. Taking planning in England by the middle of the nineteenth century for instance, and the relationship between the room and the corridor we arrive at a point where we can see how the imagination of the interior allowed a sense of comfort to be implemented architecturally. The comfort, however, was instituted as one of the elements which allowed the interior to apply the effect it did to architecture and through the inhabitants' way of life the interior was strengthened and applied to architecture. A distinct association was put forward with the ever-growing desire for comfort and the architectural technique of asymmetrical planning.10 The efficiency of the level of comfort being applied to the inhabitants with only the interior was limited; therefore the arrival to an efficiently designed, comfortable domestic space was imagined through the architectural organization represented by the plan. Robert Kerr in his book ‘The Gentleman’s House (1864), describes the effect of the interior on architecture as applying comfort by separating the inhabitants and functions form one another.11 Robin Evans in His essay points at the English domestic planning in the nineteenth century as well as how Robert Kerr’s readings centralized a technique of ‘room and corridor planning’, with it resulting in separating spaces of served and spaces of a servant in terms of movement and access. The formation of interpersonal relationships and the layers of identity within the domestic space, were rather placed on objects as ‘interior’ and furnishing creating an architectural hierarchy with the removal of bodies in direct contact with bodies. While the interior formed its place and its effect on architecture, it also created space of separation in relation to comfort and although the interior was neither a filler nor decoration anymore, the concept had a new effect on how spatial organization was formed. While this initially started as a consequence of a desire for domestic comfort, it’s effect on architecture continued to grow through time resulting in the inhabitant as a refugee. The interior in many ways became the ‘Container of personal privacy and comfort’ even within gendered and familial domestic roles. The argument of the interior not creating seal was no longer relevant since the interior had alienated bodies from one another and from their context.
The design precisely is to create a space to increase the level of relationships between the inhabitants in something more than day to day speech. To increase the level of trust, interactions and dependency on one another and to almost work as a singular unit to sustain their spot with allowing for this action to take part.
